Ghost Stories
by Ryuujitsu
Summary: Mutou Yuugi died sixty years ago, but the phone keeps ringing. Dark, ghostfic, parallels and some yuri.


ghost stories  
yuugiou fanfiction  
ryuujitsu & co.

Disclaimer: Saying we own Yuugiou is like saying white is black. Now, if we were the Church and you were Ignatius Loyola, you might think so, but. . .

A/N: Inspiration comes from weird places. I should really be working on other things right now. But, ah, God, it begs to be written! I hope it comes out alright.

-

The first one comes at two in the morning. The father hears it the next day as he checks the messages, a young voice, soft and unsteady: _Yuugi, it's me. You haven't called in so long. How are you? How—_and he deletes it, because he does not know this voice.

The second is at dinner, with the whole family gathered. Kazuko, bless her, dangles her little feet and says, Shouldn't we pick up?

Leave it, says the father, it's no one we know, and as they eat the machine clicks, records. The same young voice, the same boy, worried. _Yuugi, it's me again. Aren't you home yet? You're there, aren't you? Look, is something wrong? _A long silence, a breath; Kazuko turns her pretty little nose from her vegetables. _Please give me a call. _

-

The house was empty when they moved in, has been empty for twenty years, twenty years at least, their agent says, and she points at the floors. Used to be a game shop, she says. The owner was famous a long time ago, I think. The wood is in excellent condition. It's very nice.

--It's a beautiful house. Why wasn't it bought sooner?  
--Bad area of town, but that's been cleared up, it has. She moves to the stairs. Four bedrooms, she says. Under her billowing shirt, his wife's belly has rounded considerably. The agent smiles, like a hawk. It's very nice, she says again.

-

Kazuko is five with a grain of rice on her cheek when the phone rings again. She is still swinging her feet. In a few hours her father will come home, maybe with sweets. She hopes for the special pan, the kind with chocolate cream inside. She does not particularly listen; there are always strangers who call. _Yuugi, it's me. You haven't called in so long. How are you? How is everyone?_

That person again? says her mother, pausing in the doorway. Under her billowing shirt, her belly is round.

-

The phone rings six times in an hour, and all this before the sun has even thought of rising. _I'm sorry to call so late. It's about—well. It's about him, Yuugi—_and grumbling, the father jerks out the cord. Kazuko has school tomorrow, and the baby has already started to cry.

His wife is in the kitchen heating some milk, and this is the first time she doubles over coughing, choking, teeth clenched against the pain of it.

-

Aya laughs at everything; she laughs at Kazuko's outstretched tongue, at her father's strained smile, at her mother's rasping breath, at the rain, at the telephone and the click the machine makes. She runs on chubby legs from chair to chair, gurgling, laughing without shame.

_Yuugi, it's getting worse; I don't know how to stop him, Yuugi; you have to help me. He's—_

-

Aya is barely one and Kazuko six when their mother dies, but this is alright; they can barely remember her. Something is wrong in the house, and they sense it; they play quietly and Aya laughs less. Kazuko no longer wails for her mother when she scrapes her knees; she sees how her father's face becomes. Something like death hangs over them, but they do not recognize it.

_Yuugi? Yuugi, please._

It is late at night, when the girls are both asleep, that the call comes. The father stares into his uneaten food, fiddles with the chopsticks, does not see and does not hear.

-

Aya is out with friends, laughing again, careless, happy. Kazuko, scribbling out an essay and growing up without her mother, stops to listen. _Yuugi, I'm losing my mind to him. I can feel it—I can feel their lives. . .the game is. . .it's. . .you have to help me. You've got to. _Brokenly: _Please, Yuugi—_but as she is reaching for the telephone, there is a rush, suddenly, of something she cannot understand, something cold and dark and foreign, and she leaps away like a deer, startled. The connection dies.

When the telephone rings again ten minutes later, and the voice is shaky, breathy, gasping, Kazuko is in the shower. _Oh, oh God—God, Yuugi—no, no, no, no._

-

_Yuugi, you haven't called in so long. How are you? How is everyone?_

-

The day is a blur. Kazuko wishes, cannot help wishing, that she was there when it happened, that she could have been there. She imagines herself, running toward the car with her arms flapping, her mouth flapping, screaming, _Stop, stop, oh, God, stop!_ She imagines standing at the curb, paralyzed, clawing at her bag, slipping off her shoes as she tries to spring forward. She imagines Aya, laughing as she flies, leaps into the air and twirls and falls, still laughing, crumples on the ground. She imagines her sister's skirt fluttering, hair fluttering, eyelashes fluttering, eyes wide open. She imagines the sound of it—the noise of the city, of the shouts, of the gurgle of blood in her sister's throat.

Kazuko would like to imagine that she was there, there to see. She cries with her father, both of them slumped over the kitchen table, crying in the sunlight. Later, when her father swallows four pills to sleep and Kazuko would like to do the same, the telephone rings.

_Yuugi, it's getting worse; I don't know how to stop him, Yuugi; you have to help me, he's going to—_

Please, Kazuko says, her mouth trembling. Please, my sister is dead. Please.

A pause, a shaky breath; Kazuko sobs and her diaphragm tightens with pain. There comes the barest, driest of whispers, an old memory of a voice. _Yuugi?_

Please, you have the wrong number, she says. You have the wrong number. Please. She's dead, God, oh, oh, G-God, _God_.

-

When Kazuko comes back to the house, she is thirty. It has been two weeks since her father died, and Sayuri with her long black hair and laughing smile gives her a kiss that is more than friendly, just outside the door. In the attic they find newspaper clippings, yellowed and brittle—monsters, duelists. Kazuko reads them and cries out when she sees a name, a photograph of two boys side by side, and crumbles the paper in her hands. Sayuri looks at her but says nothing.

They take her things from her room, the little childhood relics, and leave Aya's room untouched. It has been fifteen years since she closed Aya's door for the last time and sixty years since the death of Mutou Yuugi, the prodigy, eighty years since Bakura Ryou first went missing.

Sayuri is holding the door open for her when the telephone rings.  
--Shouldn't you pick up? she says.  
Kazuko has her arms around a box of books, photographs of her family; she walks quickly but carefully and does not turn at the click of the machine. No, she says firmly. Let's go, Sayuri-chan.

_Yuugi? It's me._

-

A/N: We've been getting calls from a certain "Thompson, John" for the past few days. He asks for Tim, says he hasn't heard from him in a year. We haven't bothered to pick up, and I've been wondering to myself—will he keep calling? Waiting?

As for what happened to Ryou, I guess it's a mystery. I hope you liked it.


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